Cinema is many things. An audiovisual art form, a dream, memories crystalized, ghosts of light. It's also a language, an idiom with rules and grammar of its own. Some cineastes film straightforward prose. Others prefer a lyrical approach and write poems with their cameras. There are those who make manifestos, compose diaries, some even do journalistic documentations. Whatever their uses of the language of cinema, the punctuation is usually the same, with norms judiciously followed to keep the clarity of intention, of information and tone. Still, sometimes the most interesting artist is the one that bends those rules to their will, reshaping, transforming, making them into something personal.
Mia Hansen-Løve is such a filmmaker. Instead of employing commas and periods, writing and cutting traditionally, she prefers to film in ellipsis. Constant, evocative, oft-mysterious and emotionally poignant, ellipsis…
This month, the Criterion Channel has curated a selection of three films by Mia Hansen-Løve, giving us a great opportunity to dig deep into her cinema. First up, there's the director's 2009 sophomore feature, The Father of My Children. Starting as a naturalistic character study, it portrays the mundanity of a film producer's life, moving through his stressful days at a brisk pace that never feels rushed. Scenes are short and swift, impressions of living rather than detailed snapshots of a moment in time. Often, the audience gets the impression that they're not getting enough information, that the beginning of a conversation has already happened once we arrive, and the end is out of reach. Words are being left out, not by accident.
Editing thus works as ellipsis, transforming the naturalistic observation into something more mysterious. It's a film of blank spaces, little black holes of information whose void defines the characters for us. If the power of these voids wasn't discernable before, it becomes obvious after a twist forces the narrative to go through a metamorphosis. The language of unfinished conversations remains, but the spectator is now made to focus on the limitations of that idiom. Can we ever understand someone else, their motivations, their heart? The Father of My Children thinks not, defying us to fill the void with our own, admittedly, wrong interpretation of what another human being might be going through.
Many directors create film as monologue to a passive audience, Hansen-Løve looks for dialogue. Watchers of her creations have to talk to the film, imbue its images with meanings of their own, discern what has been left out, dream up a feeling to plaster over the emptiness that the director has left for them. It's as if Hansen-Løve draws a canvas over her characters and asks the audience to project themselves onto the white expanse. If the unknowability underlined by an ellipsis is the point of The Father of My Children, its follow-up examines another potential way that an audience can regard this reticence. In Goodbye First Love, this director's odd punctuations aren't as tragic as in her second film, but they can be even more heartbreaking.
As its title suggests, this is a tale of juvenile relationships, an odyssey of personal discovery that tells as much as it hides. Through a rather conventional three-act structure, Mia Hansen-Løve documents the amorous developments of a young woman's life as she transitions from adolescence to adulthood. The story spans many years, but it can be difficult to pinpoint time passing, for it flows like a river, unstoppable and with no dramatic pauses. Sometimes, characters will comment that it's been more than half-decade since they've seen each other and we open our mouths in surprise. Has it been that long?
Because the ellipsis leaves no space for conclusive periods or modulating commas, time's passage in these films becomes as ruthless and surprising as in real life. It's not just chronological clarity that's mutated by Hansen-Løve's elliptical whims. Characters insist on remaining occluded to us, their hearts private, motivations unknown. When the shock of a broken love comes over the protagonist, we are as puzzled as she is. Didn't we understand that man? Why did he do this? We expect to comprehend those who are so intently focused by the camera, but, like the girl onscreen, we are left with no answers. Ellipsis omits words, meanings, information.
Despite all this description of inconclusiveness, Goodbye First Love ends on a period. The cycles of amorous attachment will be lived on, but the relationship that gave nebulous shape to the film has been taken by time. Like a straw hat, it has floated away, drawn by the river's current, never to be retrieved. The same can't be said of Things to Come, the last chapter of the Criterion Channel's Mia Hansen-Løve tryptic and what is, perhaps, the director's most elliptical masterpiece. In it, death happens between scenes, grief only registers in the scars it leaves, life comes to be offscreen, and, like always, it goes on long after the credits roll. It's like a melodrama with all the drama cut off, only scenes of transition staying behind.
For a filmmaker whose works seem so slight, so sunny, pastoral, even weightless, Mia Hansen-Løve's filmography is characterized by an astounding sensibility. The frustration her structuring through ellipsis might cause is balanced by the attention she gives to human behavior, its particularities, its wonder. Her films are always portraits as much as they are elliptical prose, miniature paintings bursting with vitality, life, and love. We may never know why someone leaves, why they don't say goodbye, or what truly goes inside someone else's head. We only know what we feel, what we project onto others and see reflected at us. In this filmmaker's mysterious, but besotting cinema, such unknowability is no cause for tears…it's beautiful.
Are you a fan of Mia Hansen-Løve's elliptical cinema? If so, what's your favorite flick from this French auteur?